After a period of significant growth, the American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) began to struggle with its paper based document management system. Hannah Mitchell talks to IT director Richard Howell to find how a transition to the cloud provided efficiency, flexibility and cost savings while opening up new lines of opportunity.   

Founded in 1964, the American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) is one of the most mature and far reaching cultural exchange organisations in the world. With offices in 15 different countries, the organisation arranges academic exchange programs including study abroad, au pair recruitment and educational tours for more than 30,000 participants each year. In the UK, AIFS is best known for its Camp America and Au Pair in America brands.     

When Richard Howell joined the London-based AIFS team as IT director, he and his colleagues were dissatisfied and frustrated with the paper-based documenting system in place. With thousands of student applications and the associated documentation to file, copy and send, the process was time consuming and cumbersome. As part of Richard’s remit was to look after all international systems that support the UK business, as well as agents operating globally, his first point of call was to simplify the process by moving everything online. “This meant we could instantly improve customer service, efficiency, time savings and not have to deal with all the paper,” says Howell.

However, though this was a significant step forward, the huge increase of data accumulation that AIFS was experiencing as a by-product of its growth meant that problems soon started to arise with server size, storage and bandwidth limitations. The company amassed so much data that the servers AIFS purchased were quickly filling up and causing service interruptions.

Explains Howell: “Part of the application process involves filling in forms and giving scanned documents such as references, passport details and pictures so that the applicant is more marketable. We were accumulating large data sets but had little control over the rate of growth.”

The problem escalated further when the organisation began to push for videos to be made available to its US customers. Richard and his team considered the options and were leaning towards building an internal infrastructure to host the videos. However, when they discovered that this would cost the company $50,000, they realised it was time to re-assess.

Project Cloud

Luckily for AIFS, Amazon had just launched its new Amazon S3 solution. Providing storage for the Internet, it is designed to make web-scale computing easier. “It was certainly serendipitous that it was coming out when we were looking to find a solution,” says Howell.

Howell and his team evaluated the solution by a set of predetermined, critical criteria: low cost, ability to deliver, high security and reliability. According to Howell, the S3 offering ticked all the boxes; the solution was ideal and the decision simple.

The main problem that Howell faced during the transition period was “the lack of understanding from other parts of the business”.  At a time when the term ‘Cloud Computing’ was unfamiliar to most, proof-of-concept was key for acceptance by Howell’s American colleagues in the organisation’s strategic functions. Before going live, the IT team ran a pilot project to ensure the system would operate smoothly and to demonstrate its capabilities to peers within the business, starting with things like the functionality to allow prospective au pairs to upload videos of themselves. This particular initiative began with no expectations over how much uptake it would receive; it is now a compulsory part of the application process.

With a significant slice of its storage needs provided through the Amazon service, AIFS is now able to share these applicant videos with all of its customers, including recruiters, camp directors and families. The service is also extremely quick and cost efficient at just $50 a month. Following the success of this initiative, AIFS decided to also roll out the solution for its ever growing portfolio of marketing and promotional based media. “It still amazes me how little we pay them for the storage,” says Howell.

Despite recent bad press relating to Amazon’s downtime earlier this year, AIFS has been affected by just one small downtime period since it went live about four years ago. “I think our problems would have been in a far greater frequency had we been running this in our own data centre,” says Howell.

The future’s bright, the future’s cloudy

With the wealth of benefits that AIFS has realised already, Howell and his team now plan to “take things further with the cloud”. One of the first goals is to move the Dot Net SQL server systems, used by au pairs and camp counsellors to make applications, out onto Microsoft Azure. The project is due to take around three to four years to complete and will help reduce overall costs relating to servers, bandwidth and time.

The undertaking is a challenging one. Howell can see that it’s the next logical step and the business case is compelling. However, there are technical challenges in moving existing applications, mainly because the design of some applications does not necessarily translate easily for use on the Cloud. The team are currently carrying out testing to try and solve the issues.

Overall, though, Howell is dogmatic about the value of the Cloud to his organisation. He summarises: “If it hadn’t been for Cloud Computing we would have struggled to get the video applications  project off the ground – other options would have involved too much upfront investment for the hardware and bandwidth we need. So we can do something we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. We have also improved cost and reliability and we don’t fill up servers any more; we’re not swimming in a sea of physical paperwork.  I’d say it’s been a success!”